


when everyone who loves me has died

by LailaLiquorice



Series: I'll hide you in my poetry { parrlyn oneshots } [11]
Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: Angst, Emotional Baggage, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Past Character Death, Sleep Deprivation, just... a lot of sad, this one is big sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 03:03:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20885075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LailaLiquorice/pseuds/LailaLiquorice
Summary: Cathy Parr has a family nowadays, but it isn't the first one she's had. And it takes an intervention from Anne to help her when the pain of her regrets grows too strong to handle alone.





	when everyone who loves me has died

It wasn’t usual for Cathy to shut herself in her bedroom-study for hours upon hours as she worked. Anne didn’t understand how she could stay focused on one thing so long but she never stopped admiring her girlfriend’s dedication to the causes she thought important, only ever stepping in when she got worried that Cathy was putting her work over her health. She never blamed Cathy for getting too caught up to remember she was still human, and was always willing to give her a gentle reminder to eat or sleep or just take a break whenever it was needed.

But she felt like she was right to be concerned one day when she came back from the theatre on Cathy’s random show off night to see her bedroom door shut. Normally she would always be waiting downstairs for them when they came home, having enjoyed some time to herself but happier to have her family back with her. And as much as Cathy called promises she was ok just busy from behind the door when Anne knocked and Jane assured her that she was probably just caught up in something, she couldn’t help the persistent feeling as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom that all wasn’t right.

And that only worsened when there was still no sign of her by dinner the next evening.

It was normal for Cathy to spend their Sundays off making up for lost researching time so Anne didn’t know why she was surprised to not see her in the kitchen when she came down for breakfast. She was too distracted by worry to get anything productive done so passed the time by shadowing Aragon and Jane as they did their weekly clean of the house, grateful to them both for giving her mindless tasks without asking her too many questions. Though when evening came and she still hadn’t said a word to anyone, Aragon and Jane’s concerned expressions gave Anne the permission she needed to race up the stairs towards her room.

“Hey, babe?” she called quietly as she knocked on the door, ear pressed to the wood so she might better hear any response. “Are you ok? We’re worried about you.”

Only silence answered her question.

A worried furrow appeared in her brow and she placed a hesitant hand on the door handle. “Cathy?” she said again, unable to stop the slight tremble in her voice at the thought of why she might not be answering her. “If you don’t answer me I’m gonna come in, ok?” She left it a few seconds before giving up on that hope, pulling in a shaky breath to try and steel her nerves before she slowly pushed the handle down and opened the door.

Chaos greeted her. Cathy’s desk was rarely completely tidy but the mess of papers had completely taken over her room; crumpled sheets of scribbled writing were scattered everywhere and the back cover of a notepad lay below a smudged mark on the wall, as if it had been thrown across the room and exploded on impact. Books had been pulled out of the bookcase and abandoned all over the place with one open on the desk which looked as though there had been pages ripped out. Blue post it notes that Anne had brought her covered the wall behind her laptop screen. The bed was unmade though it still didn’t look slept in, making Anne wonder with a jolt of fear if Cathy had even rested in the last 24 hours.

With all the destruction everywhere, it took Anne’s eyes a good few seconds to look past it in order to try and find where Cathy was. The sound of a stifled cry made Anne’s head whip round towards Cathy’s desk, and now that she knew where to look she saw the figure curled up beneath it amongst a nest of screwed up pages. Her knees were pulled up to her chest with her fingers snagged in her hair and was shaking uncontrollably.

Anne wasted no time in rushing across the room towards her, paying no heed to the papers beneath her feet, though forced herself to slow down before she reached her so as not to spook her. “Cathy, sweetheart, it’s me,” she said gently as she crouched beside her, waiting a moment to see if her voice alone could penetrate whatever state of mind Cathy was trapped in.

When she received no response she laid a gentle hand on Cathy’s knee, drawing back immediately when Cathy flinched in surprise and looked up at her. “Hey you,” Anne whispered, looking into her girlfriend’s red-rimmed eyes and at the tears streaking down her face as her chest clenched in sorrow.

“Hey,” Cathy rasped, her voice croaky from disuse. She looked about to say something else for a moment, mouth ajar and chest stilling, before she just ducked her head again and muttered “Sorry.”

“No, there’s nothing to be sorry about. You’re ok, we’re both ok,” Anne said as soothingly as she could, taking one of Cathy’s hands and gently untangling it from her hair to hold close to her chest.

Cathy shrugged but didn’t pull away, uncurling herself a little to sit slumped with her knees resting against Anne’s. “Shouldn’t have shut myself away like this though,” she said. Her other hand dropped to her side as she spoke and landed on one of the discarded papers, which she barely looked at for a second before crushing in a white-knuckled fist.

Watching her expression change, Anne felt a pang of sadness that the hobby which normally brought Cathy so much joy had caused her so much pain. “Still doesn’t mean you have to apologise,” Anne said, giving Cathy’s limp hand a gentle squeeze. “You want to tell me what happened?”

Sniffing, she rubbed the sleeve of her hoodie under her eyes in an attempt to dry her ravaged cheeks. “I was stupid,” she started, a note of frustration creeping into her distraught tone. “Don’t know why I thought looking her up would be different this time round. I didn’t find anything the first time or the second time or this time or any other time in between but I just can’t get myself to quit. I can’t get myself to give up on her.” Her voice was almost inaudible as she uttered that last sentence.

It wasn’t hard for Anne to guess who Cathy was talking about. Her most precious secret. Mae.

“And then when I couldn’t figure out what happened to her starting putting together what happened to all the others. They all suffered so much and I hate that so much. Bess – your Bess – what that horrible, awful man put her and Edward through. And I never knew until it was too late. I tried so hard to protect her while I could but then I left them all alone with that monster! I knew after Bess and I was going to protect them all but then I died and I left them alone!”

Anne could only stare as Cathy’s voice rose in both pitch and volume as her distress mounted. The comment about Elizabeth had caught her off guard, her hands stilling from where she’d been stroking Cathy’s hand, momentarily wrapped up in the anger she’d been seized with when she first learned what happened to her precious daughter.

“They were children,” she spat bitterly. “Just children, left alone and used by everyone who cared what they could use them for but never about them.”

The defeat in Cathy’s face was enough for Anne to shove her misgivings away to focus on what was at hand. “You cared,” she reminder her quietly, squeezing her hand lightly.

Fresh tears flowed down Cathy’s cheeks as she gave a hollow smile. “I cared so much. They were incredible. Bess was so witty and determined, Jane so clever and kind. And Mae was just perfect. I was going to look after them all, teach them how to survive, keep them safe. Me and my girls. We were going to be a family,” she whispered.

Silence followed her last words and Anne let it, too caught up in just watching the incredible woman before her to say anything with any meaning. It never failed to amaze her just how much strength Cathy had shown in those old days. What she’d done to keep herself alive and protect her little prodigies while she could. “It would have meant so much,” Anne pointed out after a while, giving her a nudge with her knee.

Cathy nodded, rubbing her eyes again. “I know,” she said hoarsely, giving Anne a grateful glance before bowing her head and falling quiet again.

“But I let them down.”

Anne looked up from when she’d been trying to read a nearby sheet of paper with Bess’s name on, glancing with trepidation at the lines of fury etched into Cathy’s face. It was very rare that Cathy was ever this angry, preferring to channel her emotions into strength rather than let them rule her like Anne was prone to doing, and she’d have been lying if she said it didn’t scare her a little.

“I died,” Cathy continued, voice dark and dangerous. “I left them in the lion’s den. And now look what happened to them; Bess was hurt and interrogated with no one to fight for her, Jane was used and paid with her life for someone else’s ambition, and they let Mae disappear. No one cared about the daughter of two ex-somebodies. I should have been there, I should have fought harder for them because no one else cared enough to do it.”

“No, sweetheart, it wasn’t your fault. They could never have blamed you,” Anne said, tugging lightly on Cathy’s hand in a fruitless attempt to make her look up from where her gaze was lowered in shame. She’d already had that conversation with Jane once before, trying to convince her that she wasn’t to blame for leaving Edward behind. “You can’t blame yourself for your death. You’d never have left them if you had the choice. You loved them so much and you couldn’t change what happened,” she insisted gently.

When Cathy only gave a hum in response, Anne reached out to cup her jaw with one hand and tilt her chin upwards. She smiled sadly at the loss in Cathy’s eyes, kissing her temple before pressing their foreheads together and murmuring “Thank you for doing what I couldn’t do for her.”

Cathy sighed as her head fell sideways into the palm of Anne’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, smiling for a second before her expression crumpled again. “I’m sorry I got caught up in everything, I was just desperate to find something to reassure myself and got so frustrated and now I haven’t slept at all and I don’t feel very well and-“ she broke off with a sob, burying her face in her hands.

Anne ducked her head under the desk in order to wrap her up in a hug, holding Cathy tightly as she shook in her arms. “I’ve got you. Love you so much,” she whispered as she stroked Cathy’s hair, letting the exhausted girl pour out her sorrows into her shoulder since clearly she so desperately needed to.

“I love you too. I’m sorry,” Cathy repeated breathlessly, her arms losing their strength as her exhaustion built.

Shaking her head, Anne shushed her gently to quieten her apologetic cries. “No. No apologising,” she said, adjusting her grip to take as much of Cathy’s weight as she could manage. When she slumped further with her head rested against Anne’s chest and her eyes closed, Anne nudged her gently and said “Can I get you into bed love? You need to sleep but shouldn’t here.”

Cathy hummed in quiet agreement, just about managing to make her weary limbs cooperate with Anne as she helped her out from under the table. Once they were into the light Anne could see just how much of a toll the last day had taken on her; her face was grey though her cheeks were flushed pink in stark contrast to the dark circles beneath her eyes. She was still shaking a little where she stood, but when Anne pressed a palm to her forehead and felt how warm Cathy was she realised it might have been feverish shivering instead.

“Come on,” she prompted, one arm around Cathy’s waist as she helped her sit down on the edge of the bed and pull off her hoodie. Her phone buzzed in her pocket as she was piling up all the pillows for Cathy to lay back against, the concerned text from Jane reminding her that it was meant to be dinner time and that Cathy hadn’t eaten anything in the last day. Once she was resting on the nest of pillows, Anne asked “Do you think you’d be able to eat anything, babe?”

A defeated shrug answered her, so Anne left her with a kiss on the forehead and a promise to return soon as she left to get dinner for them both. There was no way she was leaving Cathy in that state without being reassured that she was being taken care of at long last.

After running downstairs to see what Aragon had made for dinner, Anne came back up the stairs with pasta for herself but a bowl of soup for Cathy since they’d figured it would be easier for her to stomach. Cathy was unmoving on the bed with her head lolled to the side when Anne pushed her door open but she stirred at Anne’s cheery greeting, picking her way between the papers towards her.

Cathy watched her move, a dejected frown appearing on her face as she muttered “I’ll need to clear those up tomorrow.”

“That’s a problem for tomorrow’s you though. And I’m gonna help you and it’ll be alright,” Anne said, offering her a carefree smile.

“Oh. Yeah, I guess,” Cathy nodded, a somewhat surprised expression on her face.

Anne hummed in agreement, offering out the bowl of soup to Cathy and supporting her shaky hands as she took it. “You don’t have to finish it, just as much as you can,” she prompted her.

She just stared at the bowl for a few seconds, making Anne wonder if she was slipping again from the seemingly stable mindset she’d brought herself back to. But then Cathy looked up at Anne, bashful hope shining in her eyes as she asked “Can you help me?”

Anne was more than happy to oblige. She shuffled close to Cathy and guided her hands as she slowly ate her dinner, talking about easy topics as they did so and pausing whenever she needed to. When Cathy grew too tired to keep talking Anne put both their bowls on the bedside table and lay down before her, holding her close as the last of her energy reserves seeped away. Cathy’s body was still feverishly hot as she buried her face into Anne’s chest again, and Anne was more than happy to be her shelter from the memories that had haunted her for so long.

Tomorrow they’d clear up the mess Cathy had created, both in her bedroom and inside her head. But for now, Anne would just hold her while she slept and keep her safe from the pain of her regrets.

**Author's Note:**

> For the anon who requested parrlyn angst with boleyn comforting: I give you this very very sad piece of something.
> 
> Normally when I do hurt/comfort it’s physical, but this is just sad. Although I haven’t written kid fic yet (and this isn’t that as a disclaimer) I am very fond of the children plus my fave Jane Grey and reading about Parr’s relationship with both Bess and Jane before she died gives me a lot of feelings. Now this does overlook the discourse over Parr’s alleged part in the Th*mas Seymour bullshittery, but because this is a work of fiction it follows the notion that Parr sent Bess away to protect her and nothing else.
> 
> With that said and done, I hope you enjoy me pouring feelings out <3  
I'm lailaliquorice on tumblr :)


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